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I read this book and promptly gave it to some of my work colleagues—I’m sure you hear this all the time. I wanted to buy a case to keep under my desk to hand out to people who came in my office.

Now my manager and some others have read it and they want me to come to their book club to lead a discussion! If you have any ideas to lead me into this land of discussing this with upper management who just happen to be members of this book club please let me know. I need to keep my job!

Hmm. Tough one. Perhaps, “What I got out of this book was a deep, abiding relief that
our company is nothing like this. That’s why I hand it out to people at work; everyone
enjoys stories that have nothing to do with their own lives. It’s pure escapism!”

One of the interesting things about corporate workplaces is that they turn
otherwise decent human beings into… well, management. They’re not like that because
they’re petty, deceitful scumbags. I mean, obviously that helps. But it’s the environment
that encourages those personality traits. This could be a cry for help from your boss,
who in a flash of self-discovery has thought, “My God, what have I become?”
Your job at this book club, then, is clearly to reassure him/her that it’s only the
other managers who are like that, and gather information that will be politically useful
at your next performance evaluation.

One thing I’m looking forward to is discovering what wacky new
security schemes US Customs has come up with since I last visited. In
2006 they’d added fingerprinting and
digital mug shots. This time I’m thinking maybe they’ll swab
my mouth or get me to sing the Pledge of Allegiance. Or maybe they
have followed this route to its logical conclusion and now herd foreign
visitors straight from the airport to prisons, where any of us not
intending to commit terrorist atrocities can
fill out applications to be released.

Wow, that was pretty cynical, even for me. I’m not sure if that
struck the appropriately witty, feel-good note I want to
promote a book tour. But anyway. I have dates! And here they are:

As usual, I expect any outrage over ill-considered dates, places, etc,
to be directed at my publisher. Remember, they’re the ones organizing
this stuff. I’m just turning up and cleaning out the mini-bars.

The paperback
is out March 13, and I tour two weeks later. The early word is
that I’m headed
to Los Angeles, Denver, Milwaukee, Madison, Chicago, Austin,
Phoenix, and San Francisco. So the result of that polite
discussion seems to be that Phoenix beat out Dallas,
Milwaukee supplanted Boston, and LA and Madison combined to
defeat Ann Arbor. I’m not saying that necessarily reflects on
the inherent worth of those places. But you could certainly
read it that way.

The dates and places should be confirmed shortly, and
I’ll post ‘em here.

Also in the US & Canada, an audio version of Syrup
has been released. I wonder if that’s some kind of record,
a publisher coming out with an audio version nearly eight years
after the book. No, probably not. In fact it wouldn’t even
be close. I don’t know why I brought that up.

Australia & New Zealand

I’ve spent most of the last year moaning about my publishing
troubles in Australia. Because it really grates on me
that in my home country I am near-completely unknown, while
in the US I am near-completely unknown, but not quite so
much. This has nothing to do with wanting recognition for
my artistic achievements, you understand. It’s about impressing
chicks. But now I have a publisher,
Scribe,
and they’ve been crazy busy organizing publicity ahead of the March 5th
publication.
Seriously, you want your publisher to be enthusiastic, but
this is almost beyond that. Just today, they’ve sent me…
let me check… eleven emails. I have conversations with
them that go like this:

Scribe: “Wow. Company. It’s such a great book.”
Me: “Thanks.”
Scribe: “I mean, seriously. I own ten copies. Not for
publicity purposes. For myself.”
Me: “Oh, that’s… keen.”
Scribe: “Sometimes at night, I take off all my clothes and
rub myself with the pages.”

The Dutch Company paperback is out in March, and the publisher has produced
this incredibly slick
Zephyr Holdings website. It’s got desktop wallpapers
and email-your-friends cartoons and everything. I have no idea
what they’re about, because they’re in Dutch. But I bet they’re
frickin’ hilarious.

Unfortunately I suspect that this means Company needs to sell about a million copies
or Uniboek will collapse under the weight of its outlandish web
design expenditure. But fingers crossed.

They also seem to be re-publishing Jennifer Government
under the title Logoland, and
synchronizing the cover with
Company’s. I love synchronized covers. They make me feel
collectible.